1. Technical Field
The present invention is generally directed to database operations, and more particularly to multidimensional database processing operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Database technology has evolved to where multidimensional data can be stored and retrieved. In a multidimensional database, data is categorized into measures which are numerical in nature and into textual dimensions which characterize the measures. The textual dimensions have hierarchies and have found utility in many fields, including the data warehousing field and the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) field.
Despite the evolution of database technology, operations involving multidimensional data can be time consuming and resource intensive. An example of such an operation is querying the different dimensions in the database. Traditionally, to get a specific answer to a query of a multidimensional database, all the answers have to be calculated. This involves matching character strings in the query to each dimension hierarchy by completely walking through the hierarchy tree. A query may take time O (Size Dimension1*Size Dimension2*Size Dimension3, . . . ), where “Size Dimension” is the number of discrete values in a dimension.